Why they didn't just pack it together as one double CD is beyond me, as the original record was all one set. This just means I have to write two ***** reviews instead of one. But yes, Volume 2 is just as good as Volume 1, and they both are classics. In fact, I like a lot of the songs on this one ("Herion", "Sweet Bonnie Brown", "Pale Blue Eyes", "White Light/White Heat") better than the originals. In the case of "White Light...", it's probably because you get a longer version of a good thing.

This makes it the rarest of live albums, in that the material here is at least as good or better than the original. I also like that you can hear the band really get down and rock on a few numbers, just to show they are a ROCK band, and not the toys of the art crowd.

I thank those who released this, as it was a very hard to find work for awhile.

This is one of the rare cases when volume 2 is better than the first. Of course, it would be best to buy both but if you have to pick one, pick this volume.

This is the album that made me really appreciate the Velvets. I love live music and this album really captures the band as they were meant to be heard -- Jamming, Moody, Rock and Roll. The first 3 songs especially (Ocean, Pale Blue Eyes, and Heroin) have reverberated in my musical memory for a very long time.

A GREAT FIRST VU ALBUM! If you know the Velvets or even just think you might like them, you can't go wrong with these live concerts.

This LP in it's original Double-album form was one my favorites of the era (the early seventies being a little sparse and sometimes unoriginal), but when the CD's came out, they split the thing into 2 separate discs. So this one has lots of dreamy, drug induced pop ("pale blue eyes', "I'll be your Mirror') , and some atmospherics ('Ocean')as well as the classics ("Heroin, White Light/White Heat').
Good for fans, good for people who liked their studio stuff, also.

Volume 2 picks up where the first one leaves off, opening with a ten minute version of OCEAN, complete with Crashing waves of cymbals. This also has rare gems you cant find anywhere else like the short but sweet OVER YOU, and the 50's rockabilly, speed freak sounding combo of SWEET BONNIE BROWN/IT'S JUST TOO MUCH.
Then there is the extended noise drone of WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT.

Just more evidence that the VU were a real loose dirty rock band who were more at home playing in dive bars than the early Warhol era trendy art crowd.

When I was about 17, Edwyn Collins of the then-magnificent Orange Juice told the New Musical Express that this was the best album ever made. He may be right.

69 Live was the gorgeous, glamorous oddity with the rude cover in my record collection even before Edwyn's solemn declaration (I think we were all pretty solemn in 1980). It's a double album and, if you want to buy it now, you have to shell out for two separately-packaged CDs, which is a horrible thing to do to such a powerful unity.

This is the Velvet Underground after John Cale's departure--less arty, out of Warhol's shadow--but no less melancholy or gloriously nasty for all that. It's a long, grubby recording made on cassette in Texas during one of the Velvets' long tours of college campuses. The quality is, by digital standards, so poor it would never make it to release these days. This is such a defiantly analogue recording that, if you could still buy it, I'd recommend that you buy the cassette and play it too loud on your car stereo.

There's a sequence of songs on this album which so perfectly captures the low-life glamour, the elegiac beauty and the kinetic force of the Velvets at their best that it ought to be a compulsory listen for students of rock and roll. Waiting For My Man, Lisa Says, What Goes On, Sweet Jane and We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together--a twenty minute wall of sound unbettered in popular music. This means, that if you're going to buy just one of these CDs, it should be volume one.